Projects that require multiple people or groups of people to perform numerous project tasks typically benefit from some type of project management. For example, in software development projects, effective project management helps to assign, coordinate, and track a project's schedule, resources, and quality.
Traditional project management methodologies rely on hierarchical organizational structures, centralized command and control schemes, and relatively rigid procedures and schedules. Although traditional project management methodologies work well for some types of projects, they are often too rigid, centralized, and inefficient for many of today's software development projects and other projects that require rapid iterative development and continuous feedback from customers, testers, and others.
Agile project management methodologies have been developed to more effectively manage software development projects and other projects that cannot be effectively managed with traditional methodologies. Agile project management methodologies eschew the rigid procedures and command and control structure of traditional methodologies in favor of a more flexible approach. With agile project management methodologies, a project is viewed as a series of smaller tasks conceived and executed as the situation demands in an adaptive manner rather than as a completely pre-planned process. Agile project management methodologies typically emphasize real-time communication over written documents. Agile project management methodologies also emphasize completed tasks as the primary measure of progress rather than written reports. Because agile project management methodologies typically produce very little written documentation, some have criticized them as being unorganized and undisciplined.
To address some of the criticism of agile project management methodologies, agile-centric project management tools have been developed to more effectively organize and document the progress of an agile-managed project. Today, many agile project management tools are available, from spreadsheets to complex web sites and services. However, many agile project management practitioners dismiss these new agile-centric project management tools as unnecessary ceremony and complexity. Instead, they prefer and even evangelize the use of a large whiteboard covered in sticky notes or index cards on which information about project tasks is written. The notes or index cards are placed on the whiteboard under team members' names to indicate who has responsibility for the tasks and then moved from space to space on the whiteboard as the tasks are worked on and eventually completed. Whiteboards are successful and popular because the notes and index cards can be moved around the board with ease and provide an immediate and intuitive indication of the status of the associated tasks. The whiteboard also synchronizes all team members because everyone looks at the same board. The board also helps prevent interruptions, as most questions can be answered by looking at the board rather than bothering other team members.
Notwithstanding its simplicity and intuitiveness, whiteboards do not work well for all projects. For example, a single whiteboard is not useful for teams that work in separate offices or rooms. While some agile project management methods, such as Scrum, require that all team members work in a single room or area, this is often not feasible, especially for large projects and for companies with multiple offices. In fact, many argue that requiring a team to meet in the same place at the same time is actually not very agile.
Whiteboards also do not provide effective reporting to people remote from the board, requiring a project manager or other person to audit the board on a regular basis and create status reports that can be sent to others. It is also difficult to track the history of a task with a whiteboard, because once a note or index card is moved on the board, there is no way of knowing when it was moved or who moved it. The notes and index cards may also fall from the board and go unnoticed until the end of a project.